02644cam a22002897 4500001000700000003000500007005001700012008004100029100002100070245019900091260006600290490004200356500001800398520135600416530006101772538007201833538003601905690005501941690010401996700002002100700002102120700001902141710004202160830007702202856003802279856003702317w11938NBER20180222000425.0180222s2006 mau||||fs|||| 000 0 eng d1 aAvery, Rosemary.10aPrivate Profits and Public Healthh[electronic resource]:bDoes Advertising Smoking Cessation Products Encourage Smokers to Quit? /cRosemary Avery, Donald Kenkel, Dean R. Lillard, Alan Mathios. aCambridge, Mass.bNational Bureau of Economic Researchc2006.1 aNBER working paper seriesvno. w11938 aJanuary 2006.3 aTo shed new light on the role private profit incentives play in promoting public health, in this paper we conduct an empirical study of the impact of pharmaceutical industry advertising on smoking cessation decisions. We link survey data on individual smokers with an archive of magazine advertisements. The rich survey data allow us to measure smokers' exposure to smoking cessation advertisements based on their magazine-reading habits. Because we observe the same information about the consumers that the advertisers observe, we can control for the potential endogeneity of advertising due to firms' targeting decisions. We find that when smokers are exposed to more advertising, they are more likely to attempt to quit and are more likely to have successfully quit. While some of the increased quitting behavior involves purchases of smoking cessation products, our results indicate that advertisements for smoking cessation products also increase the probability of quitting without the use of any product. Thus, the public health returns to smoking cessation product advertisements exceed the private returns to the manufacturers. Because advertising of a wide range of consumer products may have important and under-studied spillover effects on various non-market behaviors, our results have broad implications for the economics of advertising. aHardcopy version available to institutional subscribers. aSystem requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files. aMode of access: World Wide Web. 7aI1 - Health2Journal of Economic Literature class. 7aL1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance2Journal of Economic Literature class.1 aKenkel, Donald.1 aLillard, Dean R.1 aMathios, Alan.2 aNational Bureau of Economic Research. 0aWorking Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)vno. w11938.4 uhttp://www.nber.org/papers/w1193841uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w11938